Openings in technology-mediated business meetings

Abstract

The prerequisites for opening a meeting, or beginning any kind of interaction for that matter, are participants’ presence and shared orientation towards the situation at hand. This paper analyses how the initial moments of technology-mediated business meetings involving distributed work groups are organized sequentially and multimodally. Drawing on video-recorded meetings in an international company, it documents the multimodal practices used in the process of establishing co-orientation to the shared meeting space and achieving entry into the meeting. The analysis shows that the stepwise unfolding of the opening phase requires the coordination of verbal and bodily conducts as well as the affordances of the technological artefacts utilized. The study contributes to a growing body of research investigating the emergent, collective and multimodal accomplishment of activities in workplace meetings.